Monthly Archives: March 2011

UPDATE: The March 29 hearing on cyber attacks has been postponed. No new date has been scheduled. March 29 Hearing: The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will hold a hearing on the economic impacts of cyber attacks. 2:30 p.m., 253 Dirksen Building March 30 Hearing: The Subcommittee in Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet [...]

The ongoing saga of the Google Books case will continue, according to a recent opinion from the judge overseeing the negotiated settlement. Google Books prompted a 2005 suit for copyright infringement because the service offered snippets of copyrighted material for viewing free-of-charge. The parties in the class action suit have been wrestling over a settlement [...]

Below is a list of items with policy relevance from the December issue of Communications of the ACM. As always, much of the material in CACM is premium content, and free content one month may slip behind a pay wall the next. You need to be a member of ACM or a subscriber to CACM [...]

March 14 Hearing: The Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on promoting and protecting Internet commerce 4 p.m., 2141 Rayburn Building March 15 Hearing: The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the Freedom of Information Act in the digital age 10:15 a.m., 226 [...]

On March 8 the Senate passed a bill intended to reform the patent system. S. 23, the Patent Reform Act of 2011, would take steps to harmonize the U.S. patent system with those in the rest of the world. The most notable change amongst them is to make the U.S. system based on the first [...]

Les Valiant, the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been recognized for his work in machine learning and the theory of computation with the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The Award, which comes with a $250,000 prize, is supported in part by [...]

USACM signed a letter sent to the Senate leadership last week urging them to resist the deep cuts to science agency budgets approved recently by the House of Representatives. The cuts would be for the remainder of the current fiscal year. The letter was organized by the Task Force on American Innovation and over 165 [...]